triathloning, writing, living the dream

Broke but not broke

My laptop isn’t happy with me. It keeps throwing me out of programs with a swift kick in the ass.

Apparently, I am using 55.1 GB of my disk space. And apparently, I only have 55.7. And apparently, this is bad. And apparently, the wrong response is: ‘ isn’t a G like one thousand thousands? so there’s like .6 of a lot of space.’ But the stupid laptop is needy.

Ugh.

I really dislike taking care of things. I have no interest in learning about the inside of a car. I’ll notice that the bathtub is growing its own variety of mold, but I’ll fall asleep thinking about cleaning it. No matter how many times Steve tells me what size the cassette on my bike is I’m not going to remember. It took damn near 20 years for me to learn which side of an envelope a stamp goes on. When I’m interested in things I remember painstaking detail to a stalkerish degree and can quote exactly what people said months ago. I’m a test-taking memorization genius.

But, if I don’t care about something, then, oh man, I can out-ambivalent any 14-year-old.

Which brings us back to: I don’t care much about taking care of things.

I should, I know. But, I blame this on the mentality of growing up without money and having to always take really good care of everything, because by-god there was NOT going to be a new one.

I know there are people who survived the Great Depression and were appropriately thrifty the rest of their lives, having internalized the lessons of hard work and scrimping. But I just want to open all my doors and call my dad up and yell, “Look, I’m air-conditioning the whole neighborhood!” (Kidding. We didn’t have air-conditioning.)

What I learned from never having new shit: new shit is awesome. It’s some kind of innate, psychological attempt to prove that I don’t need to feel bad about not having the cool stuff or the new stuff or the right stuff, that anything I own from the thrift store is now done so ironically not out of necessity. I can not, physically, make myself want to maintain anything I own. I do it anyway, sometimes. But I don’t like it.

And that’s why my solution to cleaning the bathtub is just to buy a new curtain every few months.

Some day I’ll be rich enough to buy a new computer instead of cleaning out the hard drive of this one. Some day!

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Side note: if you haven’t read this “Fuck You Google,” you really should. Right now. It pretty much sums up all the problems with Google Buzz in a scary way. Sure, it’s not necessarily a specific situation that Google should have thought of, but they should have realized when they automatically sign people up for a system that publicizes their information and doesn’t allow them an easy way to opt out, something could go wrong.